Linux Multimedia Sprint

To browse and download individual files from the first and second multimedia sprints, start here.

May 31 2010

Released today is the “GNU Linux Multimedia Sprint” results, a collection of more than 3 gigabytes of:

23 Sample Banks

more than 2455 Fonts

28 Scrapbooking

over 302 Brushes

more than 394 Soundfonts

more than 45 Vectors

46 Blender Sequence Plugins (Linux and Solaris versions)

4 Complete Icon Sets

and more!

The idea came first from Klaatu, originally to augment his Slackermedia project (tutorials on how to do multimedia tasks on Slackware Linux). And so in March of this year, a group of GNU Linux users spent 16 hours downloading as much CC, GPL, OFL, and similarly licensed artistic content from the Internet, with the goal of building a distributable archive of raw materials that people could use creatively on their GNU Linux system at home.

In an interview on MintCast, Klaatu said, “Users of other operating systems get all kinds of cool raw material so they can be creative right out of the box. GNU Linux distributions don’t have that luxury for a few reasons; first, their primary method of distribution is downloading over the internet and bandwidth is not cheap for everyone, and second, they don’t typically have the money to just buy up gigabytes of artistic ‘spare parts’. But we do have a whole segment of the internet with free and open source content that we can use, we just need to get them into one place for easy access.”

Already, people are asking about a second “multimedia sprint” to gather even more raw material, and indeed the original sprinters are ready to do it all over. They say that they’d like to concentrate on finding pre-made musical loops so that the average hobbyist wanting to make songs on GNU Linux would be able to choose from a series of loops and construct music without knowing anything about music. They’d also like to focus on more textures and patterns for graphic artists.

You can download the first release of “the Great GNU Linux Multimedia Sprint version 1” (codenamed “Rastapunk”) via bit torrent or from a select number of servers kindly donated by supporters of the project. The multimedia sprint team urges you to re-seed the files that you torrent, to help spread the files and burden of bandwidth. Links are forthcoming.